>>10722662
https://www.occrp.org/en/
In a series of articles presented this week, the FinCEN Files crack open the usually secretive world of international bank regulation to show how the system works, and how it fails.
The 16-month investigation, led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and BuzzFeed News, involved more than 400 journalists in 88 countries, including those from OCCRP and its network of member centers.
At the heart of the FinCen Files are more than 2,100 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) written by banks and other financial players and submitted to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN.
Those leaked secret reports reveal that the failure to stem the tide of dirty money harms us all.
The broken system, based on voluntary disclosures by banks and other financial institutions, allows people like Reza Zarrab to flourish.
For more than a year, OCCRP, the Courthouse News Service, Sweden’s SVT, and other partners analyzed nearly 750,000 documents and transaction records used in Zarrab’s U.S. prosecution, as well as SARs from the FinCEN Files.
Major findings about the Zarrab network include:
An associate says Zarrab met privately with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2011, allegedly to deliver a bribe.
U.S. prosecutors focused on prosecuting Zarrab and Turkish bankers while ignoring a related network that moved money from Chinese petroleum companies to Iran.
Zarrab’s work for Iran started two years earlier than previously thought, and was a massive expansion of an operation run by his father, a member of Iran’s business and political elite.
Zarrab secretly handled $1.25 billion in suspicious wire transactions involving Russian and offshore entities, including several tied to a massive tax fraud exposed by the late whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky.
Weak and fragmented international banking systems are easily exploited, even after regulators flag transactions as suspicious or obviously criminal.
Far from ruined, Zarrab spent little time in custody and is living in the U.S. Some of his companies remain in business, operated by his family.
Continue reading for more.